Tag Archives: Alexander the Great

The ancient world was full of all sorts of neat stuff that you can’t find anymore. All those fabulous treasures that Herodotus saw with his own eyes, and described for us… and the well-preserved body of Alexander the Great.

Back in 1991, a Greek archaeologist made a big splash for a couple days by claiming to have discovered where the body was hidden.

It seems reasonable to suppose that if it was still kicking around 500 years after Alexander’s death, it could have survived even longer, provided no one messed around with it. Alexander’s mother hated his father, so she taught him that his real father was Zeus, king of the gods–not that glorified peasant, Philip of Macedon.

The outward appearance of the world is always changing, but the dynamics of history never change.

One of those dynamics is this: there’s always somebody who wants to rule the world, a devourer of nations.

Pyrrhus wanted to conquer all the countries around the Mediterranean. He couldn’t have told you why. A woman killed him with a piece of a millstone: just like what happened to Ahimelech in Judges 9:53.

Alexander the Great conquered nations because he thought he was a god. Julius Caesar and his successors trampled other nations as their way of getting ahead in Roman politics.

Genghis Khan grabbed more of the earth’s surface than anyone; and God alone knows why.

Adolph Hitler tried to engulf Europe. His own ambition killed him.

Today there is no individual, no single nation, that’s out to conquer the world. But the dynamic of history remains. The new devourers of nations are globalists, consortia, an international gaggle of self-anointed big shots. Instead of Roman legions, they’ve got legions of lawyers. Instead of Panzer divisions, they’ve got waves and waves of “migrants.”

But it’s the same old thing, a yen to rule the world. The methodology has changed, but the motivation stays the same. Control everything and be as gods.

He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh; the LORD shall have them in derision… (Psalm 2: 4)

When He stops laughing, then they will learn who is God and who is not.

How radical was Jesus Christ, our Savior and our rightful king, the King of kings?

He was this radical:

“Ye know that the princes of the Gentiles exercise dominion over them, and they that are great exercise authority upon them. But it shall not be so among you: but whosoever will be great among you, let him be your minister. And whosoever will be chief among you, let him be your servant.” (Matthew 20:25-27)

In the ancient Near East, it was common for rulers to claim to be gods, and for their subjects to worship them as gods. Pharaoh was a god. Alexander the Great was a god. Augustus Caesar objected to being made a god (“How am I supposed to cure gout!” he cried).

But Our Lord Jesus Christ, who really was God, washed His disciples’ feet.

To this day the world’s most ferocious, insane, and arbitrary tyrants insist on being worshipped as gods. Communists call it a “cult of personality” when anybody else does it. America’s nooze media all but proclaimed that inchworm Obama a god: came as close to doing it as they could without getting laughed out of the room.

You know the old proverb, “All that glitters is not gold.” Our leaders and our rulers are a lot of glitter. Some are decent. But our world would not look the way it does if most of them were decent.

Jesus Christ, the Son of God, took the form of a servant and died on a cross like a despised criminal. He rose from the dead and ascended into Heaven. He shall return, and establish His throne upon the earth.

When men a few generations removed from the Great Flood sought to build a tower that would reach to Heaven–the story is told in Genesis 11–God came down and confounded their language. Unable to communicate with each other, they gave up their building project and dispersed throughout the earth, eventually growing into various nations, each with its own language.

We are in the habit of viewing God’s actions toward the builders of Babel as a judgment and a punishment. A judgment it certainly was; but I’ve come to think of it not as a punishment, but as a mercy devised by His wisdom.

Take into account man’s inherent sinfulness, his natural bent for folly, and his high opinion of himself–and then factor in God allowing the Tower to be built and not confounding their language. I mean, really, they hadn’t learned their lesson from the Flood, and God had promised not to wipe them out again–but what if He had let them alone?

What could be more dreadful, than for God to leave us to our own devices?

Since the start of history, conquerors have tried to be masters of the world, creating bigger and bigger empires as their means for mischief grew. Today this has evolved into Globalism: all that “citizen of the world” claptrap from the 1930s is alive and well today. And doing as much harm as it possibly can.

The motive remains the same: domination of others. From Alexander the Great to the cocktail crowd at Davos is only a difference in methodology. Alexander had the Macedonian phalanx to crush nations under his feet. Globalists have Climate Change, and the “news” media.

Imagine how much easier this satanic scheme would be to carry out, had God not scattered the human race at Babel. Imagine how instantaneously culture rot could set in, anywhere in the world, if we were all of one language.

What God did at Babel was a way of protecting us from those of our race who would devour us. There is no doubt in my mind that among Satan’s fondest dreams is world government, over which he would rule as prince–probably behind the scenes: he likes it in the dark. And world government would devour us.

Alexander, Caesar, communism, Nazism, the United Nations, this foundation, that foundation–they were all about world government, and that’s what they’re all about today. That’s what “open borders” is: an attempt to undo what God did on the plain of Shinar, thousands of years ago.

A few of you keep telling me that the purpose of all the abominable lunacies of this era is to force us to declare who’s side we’re on, God’s or the devil’s.

Chandragupta I, the emperor who conquered most of what is now India, who possibly met Alexander the Great when the latter crossed the Indus River, abdicated his throne in 298 B.C. and ritually starved himself to death in a cave in south India, in keeping with his new devotion to the Jain religion (https://www.ancient.eu/Chandragupta_Maurya/). The empire he left behind was shored up by an army of 600,000 foot soldiers, plus cavalry and war elephants.

There’s always something to learn in history that you hadn’t known before. I had heard of Chandragupta’s Mauryan Empire, but had no idea of its size, power, and wealth.

And then the emperor resigned his throne, took up the life of a monk, and starved himself to death. In an age of conquerors, he was one of the mightiest of them all.

Sheesh.

The closest parallel I can think of in Western history would be Sulla, who fought a terrible civil war throughout the Roman Empire in the First Century B.C. After shedding oceans of blood, and exterminating anyone he thought might try to follow in his footsteps–he missed two young men named Julius Caesar and Gnaeus Pompey, later to be known as Pompey the Great–Sulla restored all the shattered institutions of the Roman Republic and quietly retired to private life. But those two lads he overlooked finished the destruction of the republic, and between them turned Rome into a perpetual dictatorship.

My daily Bible readings have brought me around once more to the Book of Daniel. There is language in there that I find hard to understand. Like, for instance, the “seventy weeks” in Daniel 9.

I should’ve just gone to my Strong’s Concordance, where I would have learned that the Hebrew word here means “a seven” or “sevens,” and can be used to denote a set of seven, or even as a figure of speech. But no, I was lazy, I was already on the computer and didn’t feel like going to my bookcase, so I looked it up in Wikipedia instead.

Silly me. I had momentarily forgotten that Wikipedia habitually cites the supposed authority of “Bible scholars” who don’t believe the Bible is the Word of God. So the Wikipedia article was focused on proving that the Book of Daniel is a hoax.

Follow the logic. Accurate prophecy is impossible. Therefor, the prophecy found in Daniel can only have been written long after the events it pretends to foretell actually took place. I guess that would apply to all prophesies in the Bible, invalidating the whole book.

In his Jewish Antiquities, written in the First Century, in Book 11, Chapter 8, Paragraph 5, the Jewish-Roman historian Josephus relates that when Alexander the Great came to Jerusalem (where the city authorities, although good and loyal subjects of the Persian king, decided it would be futile to resist the conqueror), the priests “showed him” the Book of Daniel, in which his successful conquest of the Persian Empire was predicted.

Alexander visited Jerusalem around 332 B.C., about 200 years earlier than the date assigned to Daniel by Big Shot Bible Scholars Inc. So they say Josephus is hoaxing us, too. He wrote primarily for a Roman audience, with the expectation that important Jews would read it, too. It’s difficult to imagine what purpose such a lie would serve if told to either audience.

I think I prefer to stay with St. Paul, and “let God be true, but every man a liar” (Romans 3:4).

When Tamerlane, aka Timur, died, he had inscribed on his tomb, “When I rise from the dead, the world shall tremble.”

Tamerlane died in 1405, by which time he had succeeded in killing some 17 million people in Central Asia, the Middle East, India, and China–about 5% of the people on the planet at the time. Well, you can’t re-create Genghis Khan’s Mongol Empire without breaking a few million eggs. That Tamerlane’s methods included what we would call extreme sadism did not seem to diminish his luster as “the Sword of Islam.” In fact, he’s venerated today throughout the Central Asian Muslim world–although the descendants of Muslims in other countries that he ravaged are somewhat less than nostalgic for him.

It is a dynamic of history that from time to time a conqueror rises up and tries to devour the human race. Alexander the Great, Pyrrhus, Genghis Khan, Hitler, Tamerlane–and we’re only counting the ones who actually got somewhere. Maybe Napoleon has the excuse that his wars might be called exigencies of self-defense: although that excuse wouldn’t have seemed too convincing while he was burning Moscow.

Dynamics of history don’t go away. People wish they’d go away, people think they’ve gone away: but they remain. Unless history itself ends, somewhere in the future is another Tamerlane. Meanwhile, we have to be content with the present globalist movement–they, too, want to rule the world, but their methods are much subtler than Tamerlane’s.

But there is only One Person who has the right to that throne: Jesus Christ, the Son of God. All the others are usurpers.

This is a Thracian “peltast,” a lightly armored warrior. Alexander the Great used peltasts to guard the flanks of his heavily armored phalanx. And Herodotus, writing a generation or two before Alexander, called the Thracians the second most populous nation in the world, outnumbered only by the Indians.

“Thrace” consisted of parts of northern Greece, most of modern Bulgaria, all of Turkey-in-Europe, and bits of Rumania. The Romans conquered it and made it a province: the most famous Thracian was Spartacus, the gladiator and revolutionary. Greeks, Macedonians, and Romans had Thracian warriors in their armies.

But for all their numbers, their wealth in natural resources, their craftsmanship (Thracian art objects were always in demand), and their skill and bravery in war, there is no more Thrace today, and no more Thracians. Oh, their DNA is still around, mixed in with everybody else’s–Greeks, Slavs, Turks, Bulgars, et al–but there’s no more Thracian language, culture, or polity. The ancient Thracians never got serious about setting up a state, and made only half-hearted efforts to keep a kingdom going. Maybe if they had, for the sake of self-defense, set up a king, they might have lasted longer. Or maybe not.

The point is: here was a considerable people, a populous nation, well-known throughout the ancient world, a nation that persisted for some thousand years–and it’s gone. Historians aren’t even sure how it came to disappear. It seems to have been a gradual process. Eventually we look for Thracians in the historical record, and they aren’t there anymore.

Nations require preserving. They don’t live on inertia. Where are all the nations that used to interact with Israel? Israel is still here, and has been all along. Moab, Ammon, Edom, the Philistines, Elam, Babylon, the Assyrian Empire, and the Roman Empire–they were richer and stronger and greater than Israel, but they’re gone.

If there is to be a United States of America two hundred years from now–and not just a space on a map bearing the name but nothing of the character–it will only be by God’s providence and mercy: which we would be well-advised to seek at all times, to humble ourselves before Him and stop trying to provoke Him to anger.

Thus saith the Lord to his anointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand I have holden, to subdue nations before him; and I will loose the loins of kings, to open before him the two leaved gates… For Jacob my servant’s sake, and Israel mine elect, I have even called thee by thy name: I have surnamed thee, though thou has not known me… Isaiah 45:1,4

God spoke of Cyrus through the prophet Isaiah, a hundred years or so before Cyrus was born. He was born a subject of the empire of the Medes. There was no Persian Empire, yet. It remained for Cyrus to found it–with God’s help.

It was Cyrus who released the Jews from captivity in Babylon, and ordered God’s Temple in Jerusalem to be rebuilt (2 Chronicles 36:22-23). His successors, kings of Persia, saw to it that the project was completed, as we know from Nehemiah.

Cyrus was not a Jew, not a believer, and yet God chose him as his servant. The Persian Empire that he founded was one of the great achievements of the human race, although it was finally destroyed by Alexander the Great. And Cyrus himself, after fulfilling the mission assigned to him by God, fell victim to a lust for power and glory, and met his death far from home, trying to conquer the nomads of the steppes. Like so many great men, he eventually brought about his own fall. Put not your trust in princes.

His career reminds us that God is able and willing to use anyone, even non-Jews, or non-Christians, to carry out His purposes in history. We note that of all the foreign potentates who ruled over the Jews, it was only the Persians–not the Romans, not the Greeks–who treated them justly and were rewarded by their loyalty.

God intervenes in history. It belongs to Him.

I pray He will intervene in our country’s history, to bring us back to our senses and to save us.

Secretary of State John Kerry, who made his political bones calling American soldiers bloodthirsty barbarians and then ran for president as a war hero, having won three Purple Hearts without spending as much as fifteen minutes in the infirmary, recently told graduating students at Northeastern University to prepare themselves to live in “a borderless world” ( http://www.catholic.org/news/politics/story.php?id=68831 ).

Let’s see, now… no borders… that means no countries, right? And if there are no countries anymore, well, that would imply a world government–one great big universal country.

Are these globalist morons capable of rational thought?

So, if you can’t do a certain job, but then you make it ten, twenty, or a hundred times bigger than it is already, does that mean you will then be able to do it?

No.

Can men like Kerry, or men like anyone else for that matter, even govern a single city wisely, efficiently, economically, and justly? Well, what city would that be, then? Detroit? New York? London? Camden? Tokyo?

They’ve just begun to peel the lid off the current government of New York City, and the stink of corruption is already rising to high heaven. So, no, they don’t know how to govern a city.

How about a state, then? Well, look at the job they’re doing on California. And when now-Governor Chris Christie was a federal prosecutor in New Jersey, he packed off to jail at least a hundred of our state and city officials, all on charges of corruption. So they can’t manage a state, either.

How about a country? Are they any good at governing a country? If you can answer “yes” to that, there’s something wrong with you.

Dissolving national borders and trying to govern the whole flaming world as one big country–does anyone in his right mind think that will ever work? I mean, look at some of these countries! If you think the U.S.A. or the United Kingdom, among the world’s least awful countries, are governed badly, take a gander at Mexico, Liberia, or Syria.

The dynamics of history never change. There’s always some overly powerful and aggressive psycho who thinks he ought to rule the whole shebang. The only difference nowadays is that instead of a single kook, like Hitler or Napoleon or Alexander the Great, we’ve got a whole gaggle of globalist kooks, like Kerry, who think they and their friends are fit to do the job.